Vacation Homes

Berthplace of floating home design

Architect Russ Chernoff built replacement house from scratch; it is now up for sale

Skyscrapers dwarf the floating home that Doug McClelland and his partner had built to replace the home that was destroyed in 2008.

Photograph by: Jenelle Schneider
, Vancouver Sun

For more than 20 years, Doug McClelland and Anthony Tucker lived on a floating home in Coal Harbour. For McClelland, originally from Winnipeg, and Tucker, from Ireland, it was the ultimate West Coast lifestyle - surrounded by water and boats, parks and mountains, yet intimate and friendly. "It's like living in a small town, just down the shore from the big city," says McClelland.

Then it all went sideways - literally. On Christmas Day in 2008, while McClelland and Tucker were away on vacation, a blizzard in Vancouver dumped so much snow on the roof of the home it became unstable and tipped over onto a neighbouring sailboat. A restoration firm hired by their insurance company managed to rescue their computers and photo albums from the top floor, but the house and most of the contents were destroyed.

Recently, a sleek new home that was built to replace it finally arrived in Coal Harbour. Constructed on land in a Richmond marina, it was lifted by an enormous boat hoist, lowered into the Fraser River and then towed by tugboat to Coal Harbour. The entire process has been filmed for the British documentary television series, Monster Moves.

The first floating home built under the city's new design guidelines for marine and floating homes, "it has cost a fortune and taken forever," says McClelland. "Our architect, Russ Chernoff, got us through this."

Chernoff, a principal of Chernoff Thompson Architects who once lived on a boat, has designed numerous floating homes and spoken on the topic internationally. The silver lining was that they were able to redesign and improve the house, says McClelland.

"We got to build in all those things that you accumulate in the back of your mind over 20 years living someplace."

The decks are more sculpted, the exterior is more elaborate, and there's an extra bathroom and a separate office. Instead of a ladder to the roof, there is now an indoor stairway. The gleaming new kitchen has white granite countertops, a counter-depth Blomberg fridge and Ädel Ikea cabinets in a Shaker style to match the doors throughout the house. All the furniture is new, from Dekora. As before, there are two bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs, with the kitchen, living and dining room downstairs. However, the kitchen is now on an inside wall, so the exterior walls can all be glass.

Decks on all three levels (off the living room, the master bedroom and on the roof) along with copious windows and skylights expand the 1,157-square-foot living space both visually and physically, as well as connecting it to its environment. Deck railings are glass, although the bottom deck is open to the water: Chernoff discovered that decks less than two feet above the next surface down, in this case the water, do not need railings.

Other aspects of the design guidelines and building code were more challenging - and expensive. Apart from size, height and stability considerations, they covered design details like the exterior colour, materials and nautical elements. Vinyl siding, although lightweight and water-resistant, is not a natural material, so the home is clad in cedar and aluminum, which resembles the corrugated steel used in boat sheds. The guidelines required portholes, achieved here with conventional round windows, rather than the marine variety. Window placement was affected by what will be next to each side of the home, and a certain percentage of a house must be a fireproof wall, limiting the total amount of glass. To increase the glass, the Shaker-style front doors were custommade with special double-glazed windows reinforced with wire mesh at a cost of almost $4,000. Berth sizes have changed, so moorage will increase to almost $2,000 a month to accommodate a minimum four-foot distance between the house and neighbouring boats. The house is earthquake-proof and built with two-by-sixes instead of two-by-fours to accommodate more insulation.

"It's got pros in the long term," says McClelland. "It's a better house; it's more secure; it uses less energy." On the other hand, it is more costly. As a result, he and Tucker have reluctantly decided to sell the home instead of moving in, an outcome McClelland describes as bittersweet.

"It's sort of a dream project to build your own house from scratch and to have built this fabulous house," says McClelland. "We'd still be happily living in our more economical house if the catastrophe hadn't happened, but we always knew at some point we'd have to sell because once you retire, your life changes." Now that Tucker has retired from his job in psychiatric assessment at Children's Hospital, he and McClelland, who works at Marquis Wine Cellars, have more time to travel. "And it's not really good to leave the floating homes alone as we found out before," says McClelland with a rueful laugh. The loan on the house and higher moorage fees would have stretched them financially, plus friends in real estate advised that it's better to sell something new than used. "So then the decision was between live in it for a year and take the pleasure of that or make a better business decision," he says.

"In the end, we did the numbers and said, 'Let's go to Buenos Aires instead.' " They will miss Coal Harbour, which they have seen transformed from a rustic working marina to berthplace for yachts of the rich and famous.

When the area was redeveloped, they convinced city council to ensure Marathon Realty would accommodate the six pre-existing floating homes. "We were two kind of young guys when we started, and our life sort of gentrified over the same period," says McClelland. "We used to have a couple of motorcycles, and now we have a couple of BMWs. We kind of evolved with the neighbourhood." The new house will be right at home.

FLOATING HOMES HAVE DEEP HISTORY

Floating homes have a long history on the West Coast.

The first ones were log cabins on log floats built in the 1800s.

Locally, most are moored in marinas or on private properties along the Fraser River in Ladner, Richmond, New Westminster and Langley, says Sutton realtor Ricki Willing, who specializes in the sale of floating homes.

There are also 19 floating homes in North Vancouver's Mosquito Creek Marina, with plans for 16 more.

The City of Vancouver has just 12 legal floating homes on Granville Island and six in Coal Harbour.

Although floating homes can be moved, they rarely are; unlike houseboats, most do not have motors. Moorage fees in marinas start at about $700 a month, depending on the size of the float and the location; stratatitled water lots start at $250,000.

House sizes range from 400 to 3,000 square feet, with purchase prices from $50,000 to $1 million.

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